Student of “Aesthetics & Business” Course in front of ChanShatz work at Madison Museum of Contemporary Art

A couple weeks back I wrote a post about the latest research report from the Irvine Foundation, in response to which several people posted smart comments. My post dealt to a large extent with Irvine’s general recommendation to arts nonprofits to respond to audience demand for more active participation. Around the same time my post was published, the performing arts world (the theater world, in particular) was buzzing a bit about two audience member cell phone infractions that made the news. First, at the July 2nd performance of Hand to God in New York City, a young patron rose from his seat, ambled onto the stage, and plugged his cell phone into a fake outlet on the set just before the performance was set to begin; then, a week later, at a performance of Shows for Days at Lincoln Center Patti LuPone snatched a cell phone out of the hands of a patron who wouldn’t stop texting.* Lupone says she may walk off the boards for good she’s so unnerved and annoyed by audiences who can no longer restrain themselves. The misguided patron says he was drunk and didn’t understand he was breaking any rules.

Some have weighed in over the past few weeks to express sympathy and irritation at the constant threat of intrusion by phones at performances generally, while others have suggested that it’s time for performers and producers to loosen up and evolve their practices and expectations. Among those in the we-need-to-adapt camp is Scott Walters, who wrote a widely read post for The Clyde Fitch Report—Patti LuPone and Cellphone-gazi. Scott acknowledges that his own thinking on the issue has changed since he was an actor back-in-the-day; he now thinks, “If we really want theater to become a vibrant part of our culture again, [then] we need to get over this obsession about quiet.”

Lynne Conner and The Quieting of the Audience

Walters defends his stance in part with the argument that the quiet audience is a relatively new phenomenon and that for centuries the audience at the theater was an active participant. The same argument appeared a week after Walter’s post in a San Francisco Classical Voicearticle on what the arts can learn from sports marketing. The article by Mark MacNamara opened:

It’s important to keep remembering that the prim and passive persona of the performing arts audience these days is relatively new. Broadly speaking, the audience experience of old — from say, the Theatre of Dionysus to the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées — was in tone often much like right-wing talk radio: political, raucous, even violent and unhinged, but also profoundly communal, and thoroughly democratic.

We can thank, in part, theater historian (and AJ Blogger) Lynne Conner for much of our renewed awareness that being quiet in the theater is a modern phenomenon. In numerous articles and books, Conner has reminded us that it was only in the 19th century that the audience lost its authority at the live theater; after centuries of talking back to, and talking about, the theater, patrons were put in the dark (thanks to the invention of the electric lightbulb), instructed to mind their manners, and intimidated into leaving interpretation to the experts. MacNamara writes:

The gist of [Lynne Conner’s] argument is that modern audiences have lost their “sovereignty” and the meme of the day remains, “Sophisticated audiences do not interfere with great art, and unsophisticated people should confine themselves to other spaces.”

While I have been among those nudging arts organizations to think about how to make the live arts experience more relevant, meaningful, and dynamic, over the past few years I have begun to feel we are in danger of throwing out the baby with the bath water. Yes, some arts organizations need to lighten up and stop scolding the audience; yes, some arts programming is hopelessly out of touch with changing values and demographics in many cities; and yes, as a result of overemphasizing the lines between amateurs and professionals, some arts organizations have inadervertently discouraged a relationship to the arts among most people.

However, it is important to bear in mind that the revocation of audience control in the 19th century emerged in response to concerns that certain audience members were becoming too distracted and disruptive. That they were showing up at the theater more focused on socializing (flirting, drinking, eating, and chatting) than on the action on stage. Such behaviors began to cause consternation among performers and, notably, more sophisticated (read: wealthy and educated) patrons. While we now use the term passive in a somewhat derogatory manner to describe this newly restrained audience, this was not always the case. At the time, the taming of the audience was generally perceived to be beneficial. When the ragers and revelers left the building, those that remained began to pay more attention to what was happening on stage.

So here we are again. The consumer is king and some audiences have, once again, become too distracted and disruptive. Some want to outlaw cell phones and create stricter guidelines, even if that drives certain patrons away (a move which seems to be history repeating itself). Others argue that there will be no audiences in the future if the live arts–across the board–don’t adapt to the changing times. Scott Walters suggests in his post that theater needs to step up its game rather than beef up its policing efforts:

We can’t keep the 21st century outside the theater much longer. People come through the doors (if we’re lucky) and they are carrying cell phones. That’s a fact. Sometimes they forget to turn those cell phones off, and they ring. Get used to it. It happens everywhere, and it will continue happening. Accept it, and make it irrelevant. Earn attention, don’t expect it. Overcome the distraction of the age by being so compelling that people can’t look away, and can’t be distracted by someone texting.

As much as I agree with Walters that the theater cannot command attention but must earn it, I worry about the loss of the arts experience that merits and rewards a quieting and a focus. For too many years we’ve shamed people into paying homage to art they don’t understand or like; now it seems we may be heading toward an overcorrection in which we shower people with stuff that will hook their attention in fifteen seconds and that they can immediately grasp.

Perhaps we could aim for someplace in between?

Active and passive participation are historically contingent concepts whose meanings have changed over time. Moreover, our sentiments about the virtues and vices of each have also changed. I’m not opposed to the development of more active forms of participation in the live arts; to the contrary, the rampant experimentation is exciting. I just hope we are not throwing in the towel on so-called passive arts experiences.

What I learned teaching a course in aesthetic (and human) development

Despite the need to change some practices, we still need environments that enable the focused attention that some art works (whether performing or visual) require and merit. Unlike beauty in nature, the internal logic of a piece of art cannot always be grasped instantly. Aesthetic judgments in art can’t be made on objective measures or even, quite often, from immediate sensory perceptions. While one might have an initial sensory response, an aesthetic judgment comes from within and often requires a quieting, a focus. Conner and others problematize the quieting of the audience because it reduces the audience’s sovereignty. But quieting the audience could also be interpreted as creating the optimal conditions for someone to have an aesthetic encounter.

The course on beauty and aesthetic development that I taught this past spring at the University of Wisconsin School of Business (to 22 undergraduate business majors) was, to a large extent, about doing just that. The students of the course discovered something about being present in the world in a different way when they turned off their phones, focused their attention on a sunset, stopped multitasking and really listened to a symphony from beginning to end, sat in the balcony of the Overture Center and watched Hubbard Street Dance, or stood silently in front of an artwork for 30 minutes (an activity captured in photo at the top of this post).

The class was an experiment and many of the choices I made this first time around were developed out of personal experience (thinking about how my own tastes and capacity to make meaning from arts experiences evolved over time) and from reading research on the nature of the aesthetic experience. One seminal book that guided my thinking was The Art of Seeing: An Interpretation of the Aesthetic Encounter by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Rick Emry Robinson. Csikszentmihalyi equates the aesthetic experience to that of flow. He arrived at this conclusion as a result of a qualitative and quantitative study of experts in the art world (who, unsurprisingly, have aesthetic experiences more frequently than most of us). Flow is an experience in which one is deeply absorbed, one loses a sense of time, and one feels joy and mastery while performing an activity (whether writing a section of a novel,operating on someone, having a conversation, playing a video game, or experiencing a great artwork). In other words, the meaningful aesthetic encounter is not a passive one.

Importantly, it is difficult to achieve flow if one is stretched too far beyond one’s natural capabilities; arguably, many audiences come to arts events without the requisite knowledge or previous experience to feel mastery.

In planning the course I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out the optimal order of experiences; and I made adjustments over the course of the term in response to subtle forms of feedback from the students. At each step, I wanted them to feel challenged but never incompetent. Moreover, I refrained from giving assessments for several weeks. I wanted the students to focus on the experience itself; and I wanted them to cultivate the ability to make and articulate (internal) aesthetic judgments. I also frequently encouraged them to generate a creative response to each experience (make a drawing, write a haiku, etc.) If I teach the class again I will continue to experiment with its methods. I’ve become compelled by this notion of finding better ways to help people cultivate an aesthetic sensibility. My aim is not for them to become patrons of the arts, per se (although that could be a beneficial outcome, as well); I simply believe that there is great value in this way of experiencing and approaching life.

If we want people to feel engaged (rather than bored) at orchestral concerts, museums, dance performances, and theater pieces there are many approaches we can try. We can try letting them keep their phones on and Tweet from the back row. We can try producing more spectacular works and encouraging people to jump out of their seats and shout back at the stage when they feel moved to do so. We can try taking performances and exhibitions to nontraditional settings and letting people eat, drink, and socialize as they experience the arts event. And we can try inviting the people to create the work and bring it to life with us. Many organizations are trying these very methods–and many others–with great success. Alongside these experiments in active participation strategies, however, I hope some arts organizations will also (continue to?) experiment with ways to make the so-called “passive” artistic experience more meaningful and rewarding, especially for newcomers. Something wonderful can also come from sitting quietly, doing nothing, and focusing one’s attention on the work.

* An earlier version of this post stated that LuPone stopped the performance to take the cell phone from the patron but this has been corrected to reflect that she took the phone during a stage exit during which her character was blocked to shake hands with audience members.

]]>http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/2015/07/in-defense-of-the-quieting-of-the-audience-and-so-called-passive-participation/feed/21Valuable data, questionable field recommendations. (A response to Irvine’s latest report on arts participation.)http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/2015/07/valuable-data-questionable-field-recommendations-a-response-to-irvines-latest-report-on-arts-participation/
http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/2015/07/valuable-data-questionable-field-recommendations-a-response-to-irvines-latest-report-on-arts-participation/#commentsMon, 06 Jul 2015 12:46:22 +0000http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/?p=583A few years ago I had a meeting with a PhD advisor in the US to talk through the proposed chapter breakdown for my dissertation. When discussing the key components of my final chapter I conveyed that it would include a major section covering policy implications and recommendations for arts organizations, artists, and funders. My advisor smiled a bit and said, “Well, let’s see if you earn that section, first.” It was a good lesson. Whenever I come across a passage in a research study that begins, “The evidence suggests that arts organizations should, could, might …” my antenna goes up and I ask whether the recommendations are merited, or whether liberties have been taken.

I share this anecdote because I recently reviewed the findings from a very good study commissioned by the Irvine Foundation—The Cultural Lives of Californians, undertaken by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. While the report itself is chock-full of both data and provocative questions that I imagine could be of great value to arts organizations who are sincere about such things as broadening, deepening and diversifying audiences (the motto brought to us by Wallace and Rand back in the day), the Irvine Foundation seems to be overreaching with its follow-on recommendations for arts organizations.

A brief exposition:

A few years ago the Irvine Foundation (located in California) made a dramatic shift in its arts grantmaking strategy. As executive director of the LA County Arts Commission, Laura Zucker, once put it, “Irvine’s constituency seems to have shifted fromarts organizationstopeople in the community not being served by arts organizations.” *

Irvine’s current aim is to promote engagement in the arts for all Californians. Here’s the text that appeared in 2011 when it announced its plans:

Under the new strategy, the foundation will work to boost participation among low-income and ethnically diverse populations that have traditionally been underserved by arts nonprofits; support programs that expand how Californians actively participate in the arts, including the use of digital technology to produce or curate art; and use diverse, non-traditional spaces, especially in regions with few arts-specific venues.

In support of this democratic ideal the Foundation launched in 2013 a new Exploring Engagement Fund to support projects that “aim to engage new and diverse populations by adding active participation opportunities and/or incorporating the use of nontraditional arts spaces” (emphases added). While some nonprofit professional arts organizations in its portfolio met this news with enthusiasm, evidently uptake on the new program was slow. Many of the Foundation’s historic arts grantees seemed unwilling to follow the carrot.

I addressed this resistance a couple years ago in two blog posts (here and also here). My view, in a nutshell, was (and still is) this: While the Irvine Foundation may have been justified in pursuing a brave new strategy, its grantees were also justified in rebuffing it. I wrote:

Irvine appears to be interested in bringing about a kind of diversity (i.e., change) in the arts sector we don’t often talk about: aesthetic diversity. … However well-researched and justified, Irvine must recognize (and I think it does) that its strategy is out of line with the missions of a majority of professional arts organizations, which were formed to present work by professionals for audiences that come to appreciate that work, not make it. … Irvine needs to recognize that it is endeavoring to coax organizations into uncharted territory. It wants to coerce a change that many cannot make, or do not want to make.

On The Cultural Lives of Californians

So here we are two years later and Irvine has released the findings from its latest study, which investigated differences in arts and culture participation behaviors across California’s diverse population. It probably goes without saying that many of those surveyed are not patrons of traditional fine arts organizations. Researchers sought to understand (1) what counts as culture, (2) where culture happens, (3) its value to people, and (4) the role of technology in the cultural lives of Californians.

One outcome of the study is an expanded concept of arts participation–one that reflects seven types of behavior researchers encountered: art-making, arts-going, arts-learning, media-based consumption, supporting arts and culture (i.e., volunteering time, money or resources), using social media, and the nebulous category additional activities. Irvine is not alone in expanding the aperture on arts participation. The NEA has made a similar shift in its periodic survey of public participation in the arts (discussed in this NEA blog post written by director of research Sunil Iyengar).

So, what’s the headline of Irvine’s latest report? Well, it seems to be a good news/bad news message.

First, the report “reframes” the broken-record lament that arts participation is in decline by advancing the much more optimistic perspective that if the definitions of ‘art’ and ‘participation’ are expanded to encompass such things as salsa dancing at the community center, singing at church, knitting at home, watching a YouTube video demonstrating how to knit, writing fan fiction, posting a comment to Facebook about an artist, or taking a photograph and posting it on Instagram–then, actually, significantly more people participate in the arts and culture than previously acknowledged.

(That this might not be encouraging news for orchestras whose audiences for concerts are in decline seems to be a perspective the report doesn’t want to indulge.)

However, the report is not simply a pep rally to drum up enthusiam for the breadth and diversity of cultural participation in California. The bad news? While the levels and varieties of arts and cultural participation overall are “encouraging, there is significant disparity between different groups of Californians.”

It strikes me that, to a great extent, Irvine is trying to grapple with this disparity and, in particular, trying to harness the energies of nonprofit professional arts organizations to solve this problem. To that end, the report includes several sets of provocative questions—all versions of, “So how might a professional arts organization help improve this situation?”

What tools or points of access can organizations offer to support individuals in their own art making and learning?

What are the opportunities for nonprofit arts organizations to entice and engage those who typically make art in private?

How can nonprofit arts organizations make their expertise and resources accessible to people who choose to engage culturally in non-arts-specific spaces, including private settings, such as the home?

What are the opportunities for the nonprofit sector to work in and with community spaces without being disruptive to the activity already underway?

How can nonprofit arts organizations make their expertise accessible to people who choose to engage culturally online or through mobile devices

I wonder if I am alone in bristling a tiny bit at these questions, which lead a bit too obviously in the direction of Irvine’s grantmaking strategy. Nonetheless, the market is changing, disparities exist, and it’s not unreasonable to at least turn to professional arts groups and ask, “So, what about this market? Do you think you might have something to offer here?”

While the report merely hints at possible strategies for arts organizations, a blog post by Irvine president Josephine Ramirez introducing the report is more direct. In What Arts Organizations Should Know About the Cultural Lives of Californians, Ramirez states, “this study, and a growing body of research, point to several important opportunities and implications for arts organizations and the sector.” She mentions five, three of which are:

Respond to the high demand for more active arts participation;

Expand offerings to meet people where they are; and

Explore how the arts can stimulate greater participation and connection among California’s largest and growing demographic groups.

Sound familiar?

Basically, the conclusions drawn from the research are that arts organizations need to develop the sorts of programs and initiatives that Irvine has been trying to spur through its Exploring Engagement Fund.

Overreaching?

And this brings me to my basic concerns about the report. While it is extraordinarily worthwhile for a foundation to shine a light on arts and cultural participation among those disinclined to participate in traditional fine arts institutions, and while smart arts organizations will look at this data and seek to understand what it conveys about arts participation behaviors across diverse populations, I’m not sure that the implications proposed by Ramirez are realistic.

Essentially, Ramirez is suggesting that nonprofit professional arts organizations need to develop new products (e.g., those that meet the demand for active participation and those that happen where people are rather than in the traditional arts space) for new markets (e.g. first generation immigrants and other growing groups who are not currently participating in the arts). This is a move that carries enormous risks.

This Ansoff Matrix demonstrates the point.

If a business is doing well, then (from its perspective) the best strategy is to continue to create the product it knows for the market it knows (market penetration). However, when that market is in decline (and one could argue that this is the case for many professional arts groups at the moment), its least risky move is either (a) to develop new products for existing markets (product development), or (b) to develop new markets for existing products (market development).

Asking arts organizations to develop new products for new markets sends them diagonally into the box marked diversification and is a high-risk move; there can be a significant chance of failure. And while Irvine might be willing to underwrite some of the financial risks associated with experiments in this realm, it can’t underwrite the strategic, operational, compliance, social, and psychological risks associated with such changes—organizations need to be ready, willing, and able to bear these on their own.

Areas for further research?

There seem to be a few assumptions embedded in Ramirez’s recommendations to arts organizations to venture into this realm.

The first is alluded to above. It’s the assumption that profesional museums, theaters, opera companies, dance companies, and orchestras have the capabilities and resources to do this work. This assumption may derive from the difficult reality of an overbuilt nonprofit sector and a desire to see existing assets (whose value may be declining anyway) redeployed in service of a new set of needs. It may derive from the loyalty Irvine feels to its historic grantees and a desire to continue to support them in some way (rather than abandon them for others). Whatever the motivations underpinning the assumption, however, I am not sure it’s sound.

A related concern is that the emphasis on spurring traditional arts organizations into this realm seems to overlook the excellent work being done (for decades now) by grassroots or community-based organizations. They have the necessary skills, values, and ties to diverse populations. Many are already reaching representative audiences (which seems to be Irvine’s primary goal). They are also, quite often, underresourced. Would a better recommendation be that grassroots and community-based organizations merit greater investment to meet this growing need?

The second assumption is the flipside of the first: it’s that first-generation immigrants, the elderly, and the other populations about whose cultural lives Irvine is most concerned desire deeper engagement with opera companies, orchestras, dance companies, museums, and theaters. Is there evidence that this is true?

The third assumption seems to be that art-making is swallowing arts-going whole and that there will be no demand in the future for receptive arts experiences and organizations that are uniquely qualified to offer them. And yet reading the report I was struck by how much interest there still seems to be in good, old-fashioned, “passive” arts-going. Will professional arts organizations that avoid developing active participation strategies be at a disadvantage in the future? Or is there still a healthy market of people who want to buy a ticket, sit in a seat, and watch a show?

Has research already been done that could help address these questions? If so, please comment and send links. If not, would it be worthwhile to probe these assumptions?

***

From my perspective, the report is definitely worth a read. I was particularly interested in a section that reports on the relationship between use of social media (to experience, educate oneself, gather information, or tell others about art or artists) and ethnicity (p. 38). I also spent quite a bit of time examining two infographics that show the relative size of audiences for various forms of music and dance (pp.19-20), one that examines venues for arts-going by type of arts activity (p. 41), one showing rates of arts-going across income levels (p. 24), and one that maps the seven modes of arts participation (p. 12). Again, it is chock-full of data and I would encourage arts organizations to dig into it.

Here are some links (that Irvine asked me to pass along) to get you started:

A brief survey, which will help Irvine understand readership and interest in this data

I would be keen to hear what others have made of Irvine’s new report or its field recommendations.

* Laura Zucker made this comment at a Grantmakers in the Arts panel that I was invited to attend and blog about in 2013. You can read the full post here.

]]>http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/2015/07/valuable-data-questionable-field-recommendations-a-response-to-irvines-latest-report-on-arts-participation/feed/22It’s creative; but is it beautiful? (My talk at the Pave Symposium on Entrepreneurship and the Arts)http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/2015/06/its-creative-but-is-it-beautiful-my-talk-at-the-pave-symposium-on-entrepreneurship-and-the-arts/
http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/2015/06/its-creative-but-is-it-beautiful-my-talk-at-the-pave-symposium-on-entrepreneurship-and-the-arts/#commentsSun, 21 Jun 2015 09:40:58 +0000http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/?p=578In May, I gave a talk at the Pave Biennial Symposium on Arts & Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University. The theme of this year’s conference was Creativity and New Venture Creation. The videos from the conference should be posted here by early July at the latest (please check back if you are interested to see the proceedings). In the meantime, you may read a transcript of my talk (with selected slides helpfully embedded).

The talk begins with a preamble on creativity and the reasons for my resistance to using that particular word in the title of the course on beauty and aesthetics that I recently taught at UW-Madison. The major thrust of the talk is an examination of the beauty course itself (what we did, why, and how it went). The piece ends with a section reflecting on the possible relevance of the course to those interested in “creativity and new venture creation” (i.e., those running arts enterprises). This talk evolved from, and expanded upon, two talks I gave earlier in the year: the first, on beauty and accountability, was presented at a board planning retreat for the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company; the second, a talk on beauty and business, was presented at a UW-Madison symposium produced by the Bolz Center on Arts Administration. I am sincerely grateful to Howard Shalwitz & Meghan Pressman at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Sherry Wagner-Henry and Donald Hausch at UW-Madison, and Linda Essig at ASU’s Pave Program in Arts Entrepreneurship for the invitations to speak. Each invitation provided me with an opportunity to organize, expand, and deepen my thoughts on beauty.

Additionally, I have had requests for the bibliography from the beauty course. Here it is (with links where possible).

Kimmelman, M. (2008) Michael Kimmelman on Art, Part 1 and Michael Kimmelman on Art, Part 2 (video excerpts from the Amir Bar-Lev documentary, My Kid Could Paint That). I also highly recommend the Michael Kimmelman 2005 book The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa, which I did not assign due to time constraints, but which is terrific.

Scarry, E. (1999) On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press). The Scarry is dense and academic. You may instead (or in addition) want to read Zadie Smith’s novel, On Beauty, which is terrific (set at a university) and inspired by Scarry’s text.

Wallace, D.F. (2005). This is Water. Commencement Speech to Kenyon College class of 2005.

Wilson, C. (2014). Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group). (Wilson’s title may sound frothy but this is serious criticism, written in an engaging tone and style.)

Diane and several beauty class students at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. Photo Credit: Alex André

Well, 12 posts later, we’ve come to the last post in the series covering my course in aesthetics and business (aka/ approaching beauty) offered at UW-Madison, for undergraduate business majors. This post basically walks through the last two classes in which the students took stock, reflected on their journeys, and thought about where they go from here.

(The photo (left) is from an article that ran in a UW-Madison magazine. Unlike my Jumper posts, it’s a quick read.)

As the course has come to an end, several people have asked me “What’s next with beauty? Will you do the course somewhere else?” The answer is, “Very possibly!” I am taking the next year to finish my dissertation on the American regional theater and Broadway, but then hope to return to beauty in fall 2016. A couple universities have already expressed interest in the class. We’ll see what actually comes to fruition. I’m also interested to explore possibilities beyond teaching the course again. A MOOC, perhaps? A publication? A grassroots movement? (Ok, the latter is a vainglorious aspiration; but in all seriousness, I’m more persuaded than ever that all high school and university students need a course like this–a course, essentially, in human development.)

And while the UW-Madison does not have plans to offer this particular course again (it was offered this year only because I pitched and designed the course as part of a one-time visiting guest lectureship), the business school does seem interested to continue its exploration of beauty and, at the very least, to include sessions on beauty as part of its ongoing Compass Leadership Program, which reaches hundreds of freshman each year. So, that’s terrific.

Creating More Beauty in the World

For my last session with the students I invited no outside guests; however, I did bring two artists into the room indirectly as I gave the students assignments to engage with their work. The first artist is the Madison-based photographer Greg Conniff.

Greg found me on artsjournal.com the second week I was in town and generously reached out to offer encouragement with the course and an essay he had written, The Work of Beauty, for a 2006 catalogue published in conjunction with an exhibition of his work at the Chazen Art Museum.

I read the essay and knew immediately that I would assign it for the last class. It’s a moving, inspiring, humorous and well-crafted reflection on finding and creating beauty where you live. Here is one of my favorite passages (particularly meaningful because I moved from New York City to a small suburban village in the Netherlands and I have struggled to feel at home here the past five years):

And where we are, most of us, most of the time, is home. The character of home is made of many things, one of which is local beauty, either natural or built. This came into focus for me late one night alone on a small bridge in my neighborhood during a glorious blizzard. There, along the bridge’s familiar concrete balustrade, I was surprised by a row of ducks, a mother and her young, that someone had sculpted from the snow. They fluoresced in the glow of a nearby streetlight while the flakes, which continued to fall, fattened them with a glittering down. In the sculpture of the ducks I felt the presence of someone who had absorbed much local beauty and who, when circumstances allowed, passed the favor along. I went home and got my camera and woke my wife to come and see.

* * *

It is in our homes and in our hometowns, between work and family, that we live the story of our lives. Our challenge is to make a setting for that story so rich and sustaining that we won’t want to seek relief from it by fleeing to some manufactured elsewhere— some tourist Eden, if you believe the brochures. Why not live in a place of the sort people travel to? We could do this if we understood better the sustaining relationship we can have with our local landscapes.

The students seemed to love Greg’s essay as much as I do and many included lines from it in their final video collages or in their portfolio journals. I asked the students to sit someplace beautiful while reading The Work of Beauty and then to document that place. Here are two examples:

Photo by Megan Schroeder

Photo by Natalie Ward

I also asked them to reflect on what it would mean (personally speaking) to take responsibility for creating more beauty in the world. Among other things, they wrote about paying closer attention to people–whether strangers, colleagues, friends, or family; being authentic or genuine in their daily interactions; designing work spaces that are uplifting rather than demoralizing; passing along what they have learned in this class; and (like Greg) planting gardens.

***

The other assignment I gave related to the recently (and tragically) deceased California-based artist Susan O’Malley.I didn’t know Susan personally but was aware of her work and know colleagues and friends of hers.

Here’s a passage from a moving eulogy written by JD Beltran, that was published in the Huffington Post:

She described her work as “making art that connects us to each other.” Simple, but enormously moving, it tapped into the mundane, and sometimes humorous, interactions of everyday life. Her projects included offering Pep Talks, asking for advice from strangers, installing roomfuls of inspirational posters, distributing flyers in neighborhood mailboxes, and conducting doodle competitions at high schools. Interested in shifting these otherwise commonplace exchanges into heightened experiences, her projects aspired to incite hope, optimism, and a sense of interconnectedness in our lives.

Christian Frock wrote, “All of O’Malley’s work, both as artist and curator, reflected a rare generosity and empathy for those around her — to the extent that her boundless enthusiasm sometimes baffled cynics unable to grasp the actual work of optimism. But she knew it was work and she took it very seriously. Under her professional interests on LinkedIn, O’Malley listed: ‘Making the world a better place. Staying positive in a world that does the opposite.”

When she died (just a few weeks into the term) I vowed to do something in the class to try to honor Susan’s legacy. I sent the students a link to the HuffPo article and some other information about Susan and her work and asked them each to create a mantra for the world–inspired in content from the beauty course and in design by Susan O’Malley’s work. Here are a few of their mantras.

Megan Schroeder

Constance Colin

Lyndsay Bloomfield

Melanie Gerrits

Contemplating Values & Next Steps in Life

I spent a good chunk of my last regular session with the students doing an exercise with them using the Schwarz universal values. I first asked them to review a list of 58 values (see The Common Cause Handbook) and identify any that resonated. I then gave them the following sequential prompts:

Go through the list again and mark the 10 values that are most important to you.

Go through the list a third time and narrow that list down to 5 core values.

Now, identify your top 10 and top 5 values on this map (also in the Common Cause Handbook).

Schwarz Theory of Basic Values as Mapped by Common Cause

What you see in the map is that all 58 values can be placed in one of ten universal value clusters, which are divided along two major axes:

Openness to change (the orange and yellow areas) as opposed to conservation/preservation (the blue areas).

We then had a discussion about where students’ values were mostly clustered. In general, one would expect to hold values across the map but it is also not uncommon to hold values that cluster in one area. We noted that many had values clustered in the green (self-transcendence) section of the map.

We also talked about the career ambitions and next steps facing the students. Those graduating (all but a few students) expressed a combination of excitement and immense anxiety about upcoming moves to new cities and/or new jobs and/or to the unknown. I shared with the students a piece of wisdom that was passed along to me when I was in my 30s:

Burnout doesn’t arise because you are working too many hours; burnout is a result of living your life out of alignment with your values. If you are feeling burned out look at your list of values. There is probably some core value on that list that you are no longer upholding.

This Class in a Nutshell

Finally, in advance of the penultimate session I collected some reflections on the class from the students—including responses to the following question: If a friend asked you “What was that beauty class all about and what, if anything, did you get out of it?” what would you say? Now, clearly, I hold the power over their grades and their responses may have been influenced by this; but I was, nonetheless, curious how they would describe the class and its value. Here were some of their responses (abridged, in some cases)

In this beauty class you discover not only what defines beauty and why it is important in business, but you learn about yourself and what you find beautiful and why. Your homework consists of exploring various beautiful experiences – sometimes it’s exploring what others find beautiful and other times it’s making your own experiences and discovering your own idea of what you find beautiful. It is unlike any other business class you will take – it is routed in experiences and exploration – not numbers, grades, and midterms.

If a friend were to ask what the class was about, I would share that the course is designed to give business students an artistic perspective aimed at their everyday lives. Through a series of beautiful and art related experiences we reflect on our own personal tastes and aesthetics to ultimately gain some awareness for why we’re attracted to the things we are and what this means about us as a contributing member of a community and a person as a whole.

It’s helped me think in a different way, to see different viewpoints and other softer aspects of business that usually get overlooked.

It’s about forgetting about the fucking ROI for two seconds, stepping back, and realizing that there is a greater purpose to life than your damn material equity.

It’s transforming us into people who care.

Presentation of the Video Collages:

For the final session the students were asked to create five-minute video collages. The aim was to give others a peek into their beauty portfolios and to reflect upon what they had learned about beauty and themselves over the course of the term. The students did beautiful work–and the experience of screening the videos for each other was all the more moving because many of the students were incredibly nervous about this assignment. Here are two for you to enjoy, created by Christina Hoo and Constance Colin.

My Final Remarks–Inspired by the Late David Foster Wallace

Finally, for the last class I had the students read the commencement address by David Foster Wallace, This is Water. It’s a funny and moving talk–all the more poignant given that David Foster Wallace took his life a few years after giving this talk. I leave you with remarks I made to the students at this wrap-up session. It is advice I am endeavoring to hold onto myself:

I assigned one last essay for today – David Foster Wallace’s This is Water.

It’s a commencement address, actually, in which he begins by taking graduating seniors through the sort of typical, hellish day that he believes they are likely to encounter once they are out in the real world. And he talks about the sort of default setting that we can fall into as we go about living our lives—a default narrative in which we are the center of the universe and the whole world seems to be constructed to annoy and frustrate us as we go about trying to get through the day.

But then he offers a way out of this hell. He says:

But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars — compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff’s necessarily true: The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship…

Wallace says that we have “the freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation” or we can pursue a different kind of freedom, one “that is most precious” and that you “will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying.”

He continues:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom.

The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

His parting words of advice:

It is about simple awareness — awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: “This is water, this is water.”

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.

Throughout the past 12 weeks you have invested your selves into the assignments and experiences of this class and I believe that they have begun to return something to you … this consciousness that David Foster Wallace is talking about … a new way of looking at the world … a new way of knowing, doing, being.

I hope you will keep popping into museums, not to see everything, but to find the one or two pieces that hook your attention—perhaps because they make you feel uncomfortable, perhaps because they seem stupid and you need to figure out why anyone thought they were worthwhile, perhaps because they draw you in like a moth to a flame. Go to those pieces and spend some time. Document them. (Don’t forget to include the name of the artist and the title of the work).

I hope you’ll keep taking time for sunsets, for sitting quietly and listening to beautiful music, for days (or just hours) without your phones, and for days (or just hours) in which you allow yourself to get lost. I hope you will continue to wander and wonder.

I hope you’ll keep collecting quotes from the beautiful essays, articles, and books that you will read as life goes on … and reviewing them now and then.

I hope you’ll look at the big list of values every couple years and reflect on how you have changed and whether you are still living your life in line with the values that are important to you. If you start to feel burned out that may be a sign that you are not and that you are in need of an adjustment in your life.

I hope you’ll keep collecting experiences in your portfolio and reflecting on what you find beautiful, and why, and how your judgments or tastes are changing over time.

I hope you will continue to find beauty in “the thing to make the thing”—in the creative process, in the journey. I hope you are able to approach the work of life with optimism and creativity rather than despair and anxiety.

And I hope you’ll keep your eyes open for both beauty and her opposite, injury, and allow both to inspire you to seek truth and advance justice—to do your part to help repair and make more beautiful some corner of the world.

Stay conscious. Keep your eyes open. Live fully.

]]>http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/2015/05/the-last-beauty-class-post/feed/1Highlights from the beauty class visiting artists (post 2 of 2)http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/2015/05/highlights-from-the-beauty-class-visiting-artists-post-2-of-2/
http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/2015/05/highlights-from-the-beauty-class-visiting-artists-post-2-of-2/#respondSat, 23 May 2015 14:04:42 +0000http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/?p=555In my last post and this one I am sharing highlights from presentations by the several artists who joined us in the second half of the course and key ideas that resonated most for the students. The last two sessions, discussed in this post, focused primarily on the notions of taste and craft.

In the first half of this class we enjoyed a great lecture by the artist Fred Stonehouse, who is on faculty at UW-Madison.

Fred was laid back and put the students entirely at ease. He began by talking about growing up in a middle class family and not knowing much about museums. As a Roman Catholic, he said that his experience with art as a child was mostly from religious calendars.

Fred’s work is inspired by where he finds beauty—in tattoos, in devils, in the sacred heart, in bats, in his dog, in skulls—in short, in things that most people find rather dark. Fred’s presentation alternated between the motifs that have inspired him over the years and the works that he created. (See his online gallery for images.)

The students were able to relate to Fred and his art and many expressed later that it was a relief to understand that Fred draws bats, for instance, because he finds bats beautiful; and that sometimes futher interpretation is neither necessary nor even beneficial. At one point, Fred quoted Barnett Newman, the abstract expressionist who said in 1952, “aesthetics is for artists as ornithology is for birds.” Fred characterized artists generally as being about the idea, the object, communicating visually, having imagination and intelligence—but not being intellectuals, per se. Speaking personally, he said that he is most interested in art not sanctioned by the academy. Fred’s talk was very much in line with the Greil Marcus commencement address that I had the students listen to in preparation for this class (see below).

Toward the end of his lecture I reminded Fred that when we first met each other I had been talking about the Elaine Scarry idea that beauty is lifesaving and that he had responded, “Absolutely. It’s what keeps us from hanging ourselves.” Fred elaborated a bit on this, saying that art is an obsession and necessity for him. He commented, “When I’m in the studio I hate to be distracted; it’s hard to come out and deal with life … And if I’m not in the studio for more than about three days I turn into a total douchebag.” The students laughed and I responded, “It’s interesting to think about which practice, if one doesn’t do it for a few days, makes one turn into a total douchebag.” For me, these days, this seems to be writing. A few weeks later I asked the students to think about just that question. Another portfolio assignment inspired by Fred’s talk: I asked the students to document beauty they find in something typically perceived by people as dark.

***

This same week Polly Carl returned and did an engaging and insightful riff on the Carl Wilson book, Let’s Talk about Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. The book is Wilson’s quest to figure out why so many people in the world love Celine Dion, an artist that he had come to loathe since her triumph at the 1998 Oscars with the theme song from Titanic (over Elliot Smith, who composed the music for Goodwill Hunting). In advance of this class the students wrote about an artist/genre that they loved and one that they loathed and also interviewed someone quite different from them age-wise or background-wise and asked, “Who is a musician/band or other type of artist that you deeply admire, and why?”

I also gave them the assignment to listen to this 20-minute SVU commencement address by Greil Marcus, in which he talks about art, audience, and artistic hierarchies, among other things.

In class, we spent about an hour exploring the students’ loves and loathes. While almost all students’ taste preferences were firmly planted in the realm of popular art, their loves and loathes were sometimes polar opposites–so the exercise seemed to be a good setup to Polly’s lecture, which focused on tastes and their relationship to values. She began by taking the students back to the 1998 Oscars. She played videos of the performances by both Celine Dion and Elliot Smith and asked the students which artist they would have selected to win had they been voting members of the Academy. (Somewhat surprisingly to Polly and me, all but two voted for Celine Dion.) Polly then introduced the premise behind Wilson’s book and walked the students through the journey he makes. Basically, Wilson’s eyes-wide-open examination of Dion and what her fans value about her ultimately leads him to the point where he can no longer loathe her (or, by extension, those who love her).

Polly also talked about her experience in various gatekeeping roles in the arts. (The term gatekeeping is used by both economists and sociologists to refer to those individuals and organizations who control resources and select which artists/works are produced and distributed). Polly talked, in particular, about the tension that curators, producers, and presenters of art sometimes feel between programming what they love versus what they think other people will like. And she conveyed the discomfort she felt when she first realized that she had the power to make or break an artist and how this caused her to question her judgments and what she was excluding, and why.

This led to a brief introduction to her current position (among other titles she holds at Arts Emerson) as the editor of the online journal at HowlRound. She explained why she is an advocate for the idea of a theater commons and why she encourages the philosophy that anyone who wants to write for the HowlRound journal should have the opportunity to pitch an article. By diminishing its gatekeeping authority and, essentially, allowing hundreds of voices to be heard through the platform, HowlRound is endeavoring to expand and democratize the conversation about theater in America.

We ended with a brief discussion of Pierre Bourdieu and the concepts of social and cultural capital (which, as Polly pointed out, is the only kind of capital most high school and college students have). We encouraged the students to think about what has shaped their tastes and how one’s taste biography is tied to one’s identity. That week I gave them a portfolio exercise to think about an area in life where they now have great taste and to reflect on the process by which their tastes were developed.

Finally, in the last regular session with guests, I invited two individuals: (a) the restauranteur Joshua Berkson, who runs the farm-to-table and craft cocktail establishment, Merchant; and (b) a member of the anonymous sound collective, Mad Genius, who goes by the alias Magnus Genioso. We explored a range of topics with each of them, but the unifying concept had to do with craft.

Josh told the story of graduating from business school and going to work in hedge firms—work that he referred to as soul killing and back breaking (literally, he developed chronic back pain). While living in NYC and making money on Wall Street he became a bit of a foodie—and spent an increasing amount of his time and money checking out the best restaurants in the city. His passion for food began to become an obsession and he decided to go culinary school. Along the way he became increasingly interested in concepts like sustainable food, slow food, farm-to-table, and the American Craft Movement.

Josh ended up in Madison and opened Merchant—a casual farm-to-table restaurant, craft cocktail bar and liquor store. It was one of the first of its kind in Madison at the time. He showed one of the most beautiful PPT presentations I’ve ever seen (and talked a bit about his obsession with great PPT design). He expounded on the challenges of balancing a pure notion of craft against the reality of running a business that is profitable. He also explained the philosophy of “accessible craft” that is at the heart of what he’s trying to do at Merchant.

The students were given a chance to experience his restaurant and were quite engaged in his session. Students asked what he looks for in his employees (answer: people who are nice, who have passion and commitment to the values of the place, and who are not concerned with being hipsters, per se). They also wondered about particularly tough choices or decisions he had to make along the way.

***

Our next guest, Magnus Genioso, is an artist who creates sometimes whimsical, sometimes serious, but inevitably moving works of radio art using noise and conversation that he records. He is part of the anonymous sound collective Mad Genius, whose works can be found on Sound Collective. Magnus played several works; but there were two that we talked about extensively.

The first piece was created as part of a short radio series about the sense of place called @whereabouts. Titled Resale Records, it was recorded in a Madison-based used vinyl shop (of the same name), located in an old rusted-out shed. It is composed from a collection of sounds endemic to the record shop (the sound of flipping through vinyl, for instance) interwoven with an interview done with Eric Teisberg, the owner of the shop, about his work and life.

The second piece we discussed extensively is called Someone’s Screaming Outside and is composed from a series of 911 calls that came in before, during, and after the Trayvon Martin shooting. Magnus called this a piece about witnessing and commented, “Witnessing is really hard. Sometimes there are no concrete facts. Sometimes you don’t know what the hell you are witnessing.”

The conversation with Magnus touched on concepts like injury, beauty, and ethics as well as the nuts and bolts of collecting, modifying, combining, and layering found sounds to create radio art. He also gave the students some terrific tips to keep in mind when creating their final assignment for the class–a video collage based on what they have collected in their portfolios (e.g., think in terms of a metaphor for your experience in this class and use that metaphor to give the piece shape and meaning).

The presentations by Joshua Berkson and Magnus Genioso helped us better understand two approaches to an aesthetics of craft. Josh begins with using only the highest quality inputs and processes to create the food and drinks in his establishment; but he must balance this ideal against the material reality of having to earn sufficient profit to stay in business. Magnus begins with the material constraints of using found sounds and voices (whose quality is unpredictable and uncontrollable to a some extent) and then strives to craft from this assemblage of auricular artifacts, compelling music-based narratives.

In the SVU commencement address embedded above, Greil Marcus says:

What art does — maybe what it does most completely — is tell us, make us feel that what we think we know, we don’t. There are whole worlds around us that we’ve never glimpsed.

That’s what art does, that’s what it’s for — to show you that what you think can be erased, cancelled, turned on its head by something you weren’t prepared for — by a work, by a play, a song, a scene in a movie, a painting, a collage, a cartoon, an advertisement — something that has the power that reaches you far more strongly than it reaches the person standing next to you, or even anyone else on Earth — art that produces a revelation that you might not be able to explain or pass on to anyone else, a revolution that you desperately try to share in your own words, in your own work.

Die Soldaten at Lincoln Center Festival in 2008–a revelation for this blogger.

At the end of the term I asked the students about the experiences in class that were most meaningful to them and there was a remarkable diversity in where the students found the most meaning and connection. I invited more than ten artists to join us over the course of the term and each one of them was mentioned.

This reinforced an idea that I started out with at the beginning of the class: that we would approach beauty from as many directions as possible—on the faith that this would increase the odds that each student would encounter something meaningful, revelatory, perhaps even life-saving.

]]>http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/2015/05/highlights-from-the-beauty-class-visiting-artists-post-2-of-2/feed/0Highlights from the beauty class visiting artists (post 1of 2)http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/2015/05/highlights-from-the-beauty-class-visiting-artists-part-1-of-2/
http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/2015/05/highlights-from-the-beauty-class-visiting-artists-part-1-of-2/#commentsFri, 22 May 2015 12:55:54 +0000http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/?p=538Apologies for the radio silence. The beauty course marched on but I failed to get anything written on Jumper the past few weeks as I was finishing up the term and writing talks for two symposia (a symposium on Beauty and Business that I helped put together at UW-Madison and then the fourth biennial Pave Symposium on Arts Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University). I’ll post transcripts from both conferences in conjunction with the videos from each being posted by the conference organizations (UW-Madison & ASU, respectively).

Lynette D’Amico

Michael Rohd

Paul Sacaridiz

As I reflect on the second half of the beauty course I now perceive that it was about trying to add, subtract, multiply and divide with what we had soaked up (in terms of concepts and frameworks) in the first half. It was about releasing ourselves a bit from the philosophy and formal definitions; engaging with art, artists, and life; and seeing what would stick. In this post and the one that follows I am sharing highlights from the presentations by the several artists who joined us in class and key ideas from them that resonated most for the students.

You may recall that the students created photographic self-portraits the first week of class and we used the assignment to, among other things, discuss the difference between a selfie and a self-portrait. In the same week that Polly Carl discussed the Elaine Scarry monograph On Beauty and Being Just, Lynette brought in slides of self-portraits by two artists: Vivian Maier and Francesca Woodman (links are to documentaries on each artist and are highly recommended). Lynette discussed that what interests her is how these artists both reveal and obscure themselves in their self-portraits. Lynette shared the Diane Ackerman quote:

Selves will accumulate when one isn’t looking; and they don’t always act wisely or well.

— Diane Ackerman

As she scrolled through slides of self-portraits by Maier and Woodman, Lynette asked the students, What selves are being shown in these self-portraits? She also played the grammy video of Sia, a pop artist who has attempted to evade a celebrity’s life by hiding her face in all live performances and videos and commented, Hiding oneself or camouflaging oneself is its own version of revelation.

Lynette ended her terrific lecture by encouraging the students to further consider their self-portraits and how they might re-approach the assignment in light of this idea. After spring break the students were given just this assignment. The students, by and large, did strong work on their second self portraits. Indeed, it was difficult to choose only five to share. It’s perhaps also worth noting that more than a few students expressed gratitude at being able to go back and repeat an assignment from the past, with new knowledge, skills, awareness, and confidence.

Michael Rohd joined us for our final class before spring break for a terrific session that I titled “designing beautiful interventions.” If you don’t know Michael’s work he is founding artistic director of Sojourn Theatre, founder of the Center for Performance and Civic Practice, and on faculty at Northwestern University. Much of Michael’s work is situated in the intersection between theater and democracy. In advance of his session the students read a short text by Michael called Listening is the New Revolution, which is a good introduction to his ideas. They also spent two weeks collecting experiences (from real life, not their FB feeds) of the following:

Michael’s session was broken into three parts. In the first hour he did an exercise called, “Where I come from”—a kind of musical chairs in which the person left without a chair must go to the center of a circle and finish the sentence, “Where I come from …”. The “where” could be geographic, identity-based, or values-based. So,”Where I come from there are skyscrapers” was one geographic example. If this statement is true for others students they stand. Funnily enough, when someone made the statement about skyscrapers almost no one else in the class stood up. So instantly we all grasped that most of us were not from large, urban areas. An identity example: “Where I come from one’s parents are divorced.” A values example: “Where I come from most people are politically liberal.”

Following this exercise students talked in small groups about which of these revelations by their classmates struck them most intensely. Working in groups students were then asked to design a scenario based around a particular perspective—for instance, “Where I come from, anyone can say anything.” The aim was to demonstrate with the scenario how such a perspective could be a source of tension or conflict between two or more people. The students later commented that they loved this exercise as it allowed them to learn about their classmates and themselves in comparison.

In the second part of the class, Michael spent some time describing six projects he has worked on that he finds “beautiful” and asked the students to listen to these six stories and then reflect back to him his notion of beautiful work. There was a general consensus that beauty for Michael is knowing that the interventions or projects that he and his collaborators design have enabled individual citizens or whole communities to achieve their goals.

Finally, Michael led the students through a series of physical exercises with the material they brought to class (from having gone in search of beauty in the 11 sites outlined above). It’s hard to do justice to this exercise in writing, but essentially the students were led through a process of embodying the essence of these sites of beauty, relating their individual physical expressions to each other, and then working together to create a a brief performance incorporating text, movement, lights and sound. I would characterize it as an exercise in combining, layering, iterating, and shaping. It was definitely a challenging experience for the students, but one they embraced and seemed to enjoy.

I’ve already shared a few points made by sculptor Paul Sacaridiz (concerning the role of beauty in a democratic society) in my prior post on beauty and justice. There were a couple more themes from his lecture that really seemed to resonate with the students. The first had to do with finding beauty in the creative process. As he scrolled through slides of his studio and works in process, Paul commented:

Our job as artists is to notice the moments, the little beauties everywhere. … I document the process. At every moment I am looking for what no one else will see. … I find beauty in the thing to make the thing.

The second theme had to do with the tension between the ideas “art is for everyone” and “you need special knowledge to understand art.” Paul commented:

Museums want people in their institutions because we believe that what is inside is worth the experience. That’s why museums are often free. Nonetheless, people feel intimidated by art. We’re confronted by something we don’t understand.

One of the dangerous notions out there is that art is a universal language. It isn’t. It’s specialized. For instance, there is the Japanese notion of wabi sabi, that there is beauty in imperfection. The Japanese make pots that highlight the cracks and bumps. But westerners see the pots and mis-interpret them as “not successful.” Our understanding of beauty is culturally contingent. Just because you don’t get something, or even whole societies don’t get something, doesn’t mean it’s not a “successful” work.

Art is a kind of system. And we cannot grasp it immediately but we often feel immediately whether or not we are drawn to something, or repelled by it. Like physics or medicine we need to invest time and energy if we want to understand art, to figure it out. When we find something “stupid” or incomprehensible or we don’t grasp why it is worthwhile to anyone we can ask, “What is it?” And we can stick around and seek to understand what we are offended by or what we don’t understand. We can transfer this same skill to other things in life. Rather than rejecting things we don’t know and understand as stupid, we can back off a bit and seek to understand.

The idea that you need specialized knowledge to understand and the idea that everyone should be able to approach art are both true. On the one hand, you don’t need historical knowledge to walk up to something and perhaps be compelled by its form, shape, colors, or even to understand it on some level. However, particularly with works from a different era, to have a deeper relationship with the piece, you may also find value in learning more, in understanding the context, the history, etcetera.

Portfolio Assignment: A second visit to the Chazen Art Museum

In order to examine the notion that art is a way to understand another culture, I gave the students the assignment to go to the Chazen Art Museum on their own to see the exhibition: Tradition and Innovation: The Human Figure in Contemporary Chinese Art. The students were generally quite enthusiastic in their responses to this exhibition. I gave them two assignments: (1) spend time with the exhibition and give me five adjectives to describe the culture being represented based on what you have experienced and (2) wait three days and document the work in the exhibition whose form proves to be most memorable.

In response to the second part of the assignment, foreign exchange student Constance Colin (from France) reflected:

Mortals – Endless Tower, Xiang Jing

Dialogue, David Kukhalashvili

At first I thought the piece that stuck to my mind would be the painting of Chi Peng entitled “Mood is never better than memory” because I stayed watching that one for a long time … However, two days after, the one that I could not forget was Endless Tower (sic) of Xiang Jing. It was so impressive by its size and striking. From a far point of view, you tend to think that all the women are similar but getting closer you realize the faces are all different. [It] raises the question of being special and unique in a society that pushes you to fit in, to be like others. To illustrate this experience, I chose a piece I found on a social media dedicated to art I really enjoy, Stack (theartstack.com), entitled “Dialogue” by David Kukhalashvili.

Another student, Stacey Dougherty, wrote about the following artwork:

Photo by Eric Baillies. Su Xinping, “Busy People No. 1

I don’t remember the name, but the piece that sticks most in my mind is the large painting of the Chinese man walking in what looks like fire. The picture intrigued me because I could not stop wondering, where is that man going? Why is he taking such long strides? Is he walking into hell? …

She documented her interpretation of the work in a Haiku:

Hell is Near

Fire is burning now / I run, but cannot escape / Hell is awaiting

In class I reminded the student that the title of the work is Busy People No. 1. I remarked that her interpretation, combined with the title, caused me to think that by racing through life and not being present, by allowing life to be consumed by busy-ness, we are, in a sense, living in a kind of hell.

Perhaps letting beauty in and letting it work on us helps us make strides in the other direction?

]]>http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/2015/05/highlights-from-the-beauty-class-visiting-artists-part-1-of-2/feed/2Approaching Justice & Democracy (in Beauty Class)http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/2015/04/approaching-justice-democracy-in-beauty-class/
http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/2015/04/approaching-justice-democracy-in-beauty-class/#commentsWed, 29 Apr 2015 15:27:45 +0000http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/?p=527In last week’s post I wrote about a lecture by Polly Carl on the first half of Elaine Scarry’s monograph on beauty, which focuses on the relationship between beauty and truth. This week’s post takes as a starting point Polly’s lecture on the second half of Scarry’s book, which focuses on the relationship between beauty and justice. From there, it explores the importance of beauty in a democratic society.

How beauty presses us toward justice

Polly began her lecture by explaining that there are two enduring criticisms of beauty that Scarry seeks to counter.

(1) The first criticism is that beauty distracts us from social wrongs. Scarry counters with the argument that seeing something beautiful wakes us up and inspires us to turn our attention to others. She writes (on p. 81) of Plato’s notion that we move from “eros,” in which we are seized by the beauty of one person, to “caritas,” in which our care is extended to all people.

(2) The second criticism of beauty is that the viewer’s gaze is destructive to the object or person. Scarry counters this idea with the argument that when we pay attention to another being, both viewer and object come alive. She writes (on p. 90), Beauty is, then, a compact, or contract between the beautiful being (a person or thing) and the perceiver. As the beautiful being confers on the perceiver the gift of life, so the perceiver confers on the beautiful being the gift of life. [1]

Scarry also finds that these two enduring criticisms of beauty are fundamentally contradictory. The first assumes that if our ‘gaze’ could just be shifted away from beauty toward some neglected object our attention would bring the wronged object remedy; the second assumes that sustained attention can never be beneficial and always brings suffering to the object.

Scarry addresses these two criticisms as the first step in her thesis that:

… beauty, far from contributing to social injustice in either of the two ways it stands accused, or even remaining neutral to injustice as an innocent bystander, actually assists us in the work of addressing injustice …

Below is a video of a lecture in which Scarry outines the key arguments about beauty and social justice from her book. My points below are drawn from this videotaped lecture.

Scarry prefaces her talk by noting that beauty and justice share the same synonym—fairness—and that, etymologically, the word that best describes the opposite of both beauty and justice is injury. Scarry then outlines three sites in which beauty presses us toward justice.

I. Beauty in the object itself.

The attributes of the beautiful object have parallel attributes in justice. For example, the symmetry in a flower, or a poem, or Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, models the concept of justice, which is defined by John Rawls as “a symmetry of everyone’s relations to each other.”

II. The immediate response to beauty in the viewer.

In The Sovereignty of Good Iris Murdoch’s asks, “How can we make ourselves better?” She answers: In a secular age, beauty is the “most obvious thing in our surroundings” to help us “move in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity, and realism.”[2] Murdoch observes that when a beautiful object hooks our attention it draws us out of our normal state of selfish absorption and shifts our attention to the world around us. She calls this process unselfing.

Scarry’s term for this unselfing is opiated adjacency, by which she means that beauty reveals to us that we are not the center of the universe, but that the experience of ‘sitting on the sidelines’ is pleasurable. Scarry argues that while many things can bring us pleasure and many things can knock us into the margins, beauty may be the only thing that does both. When we are transfixed by the beautiful object, it inspires in us a desire to locate truth (discussed in last week’s post) and advance justice.

III. In the aftermath, when beauty gives rise to the act of creation.

This is the idea of replication or unceasing begetting (also discussed in last week’s post). When we see beauty we are drawn to create more beauty: We write a poem, take a photograph, compose a song, bake a cake, plant a garden, draft a legal treatise, share a beautiful object with another. This unceasing begetting inevitably leads to the distribution of more beauty in the world.

The importance of beauty in a democratic society

A couple of weeks after Polly’s lecture I asked the students to read the first 55 pages (sections I-III) of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. My aim was to explore the importance of beauty (in particlar, art and artists) in a democratic society. As President John F. Kennedy spoke in a 1963 speech honoring the life of poet Robert Frost:

If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our Nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. … Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society–in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation.

In her beautiful book-length poem, interspersed with images, Claudia Rankine raises our consciousness of everyday acts of racism. Two of the sections the students read are, essentially, a record of injurious remarks that Rankine has taken in and a recounting of the anger that has built up over time in response to these humiliations. She gives testimony to these everday shocks to the system as in a diary or logbook: one per page, page upon page. Here are two pages:

Page 12

Because of your elite status from a year’s worth of travel, you have already settled into your window seat on United Airlines, when a girl and her mother arrive at your row. The girl, looking over at you, tells her mother, these are our seats, but this is not what I expected. The mother’s response is barely audible—I see, she says. I’ll sit in the middle.

Page 43

When a woman you work with calls you by the name of another woman you work with, it is too much of a cliché not to laugh out loud with the friend beside you who says, oh no she didn’t. Still, in the end, who cares? She had a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right.

Yes, and in your mail the apology note appears referring to “our mistake.” Apparently your own invisibility is the real problem causing her confusion. This is how the apparatus she propels you into begins to multiply its meaning.

What did you say?

In addition to exploring the meaning and impact of particular passages, I prompted discussion among the students with a number of questions:

What is Rankine’s goal with this work?

Does it turn you off or draw you in? Why?

Do you recognize this everyday racism she’s talking about?

How does reading this poem make you feel?

Have you witnessed or experienced or participated in these types of injuries?

Where else and how else do we dehumanize people?

Have you ever felt injured in this way?

Dehumanization explored on a visit to the Chazen Museum of Art

The day we discussed Rankine we also spent an hour at Chazen Museum of Art viewing four artworks, selected by the docents. Two were the sculptures Humiliation by Design by Beth Cavener Stichter and Black Jack, by Inigo Manglano-Ovalle.

Beth Cavener Stichter’s 2009 sculpture, Humiliation by Design.

Inigo Manglano-Ovalle’s 2006 sculpture, Black Jack.

With the docents, we observed the threatening angle and missile-like tip of Black Jack, as well as the work’s cold, dark, impenetrable surface. We interpreted it to be about asserting power over another. It brought to mind notions of war games and star wars. We also noted that the large globes of the jack reflect back to the viewer a distorted self image. In contrast, Cavener’s goat (evidently based on someone she knows, as many of her works are) embodies the state of being systematically disgraced, shamed, tortured, or disempowered by another. We were at first repelled by and then drawn into this sculpture. The students were invited to spend more time with the work they found most interesting. A majority decided to revisit the goat sculpture.

After the Chazen visit, sculptor Paul Sacaridiz (who is currently chair of the Art Department at UW-Madison) talked about his work and process (more on that in another post); however, he also took a few moments at the top of his talk to speak to the importance of beauty (and, in particular, artists and art) in a democratic society. He commented to the students, “As graduates of a university, you have an obligation to look at the world critically and to question things. […] Art is a way of understanding the world; and there is no better way of comprehending things that are ambiguous or contradictory or complex than by going to see art. […] If you spend time with art you begin to develop this understanding.”

Portfolio Assignment: Injury Documented

While the students’ portfolios are intended primarily as catalogues of their experiences of the beautiful, in week 8 I gave them the exercise: Creatively document a way in which you see people being dehumanized in your world (small world or big world). Many documented ways in which the homeless, the physically different, those with mental illness, the LGBT community, and ethnic minorities are routinely dehumanized. A few also captured the everyday harms we inflict upon each other in our day-to-day social interactions on social media and in person. A good example of the latter is this poem by student, Michelle Croak. I end this post by sharing it with you.

It is saying “Hello!” on the street
and a negative thing behind closed doors.
It is asking your roommate how their day was
and checking your email while they answer.
It is telling someone you are SO sorry
and feeling nothing but regret for saying the “S word.”
What is it?

It is telling someone “We should catch up!”
without following up.
It is saying “I love you”
without action to back it up.
It is offering to cover someone’s portion of the check
without bringing out your credit card.
What is it?

It is unconditional love
but including all the conditions.
It is being Facebook Official
but refusing to hold hands around others.
It is saying everyone is equal
but not including everyone.
What is it?

What is it?Dishonest. Insincere. Artificial. Untruthful. Disingenuous. Dehumanizing.
Do we need a single word, a single phrase for all of these actions?
Do you see yourself in them? Do you see others?
Have you witnessed them and said nothing?
Then the next time I ask you, “What is it?”
You only need one word to answer.
Me.

Elaine Scarry is a major contributor to the discussion on beauty. In the sixth week, the always brilliant Polly Carl gave a lecture on Scarry’s monograph (based on a series of lectures), “On Beauty and Being Just.” Scarry is a professor of aesthetics and literature and her book is an attempt to rescue beauty from its banished state in the humanities (by which Scarry means the conversation about beauty, not beautiful objects themselves).

It’s difficult to summarize Elaine Scarry’s potent monograph in a few paragraphs, much less Polly Carl’s reflections on Scarry. I’ve cherry-picked a few ideas from Polly’s lecture on the first half of Scarry’s monograph, On Beauty and Being Wrong, which examines how beauty evokes in us a longing or conviction to locate what is true.

Akin to (but more rigorous than) the characteristics of beauty proposed by Howard Gardner (which are essentially aimed at helping us recognize the beautiful experience), Elaine Scarry proposes four features of beauty:

Beauty is sacred. An encounter with the beautiful is almost like a religious experience; it seems to have been inspired by the gods.

Beauty is unprecedented. An encounter with the beautiful initially causes you to reel backwards in your mind and search “Have I seen this before?” (You have not; or if you have, only rarely.)

Beauty is lifesaving. “Beauty quickens. It adrenalizes. It makes the heart beat faster. It makes life more vivid, animated, living, worth living.”

Beauty incites deliberation. Beauty fills you with something beside yourself and you are then inspired to go forward and locate what is true. It’s a starting point. It inspires imagination. It makes us want to live better. We are constrained by the material world; but we can imagine anything. Beauty does that.

II. Beauty compels replication

Correspondent with Howard Gardner’s notion that beautiful experiences invite revisiting, Scarry asserts that beauty compels replication (what she calls unceasing begetting). This doesn’t necessarily mean that if you see a beautiful flower you will photograph or draw it (though it might). This replication takes many forms. For example: We linger. We stare. We replay an image or scene in our mind. We play the same song over and over again. We insist to others, “You must see this!” We send postcards, “Wish you were here.”

III. We can be wrong about beauty

One of the recurring discussions in the course is around the notion that beauty is subjective (Gardner argues to the point of being idiosyncratic, even). Something is beautiful to you but not to me, for instance, and this difference is a factor of many things (including cultural background, context, education, and aesthetic sensibility). Related to this, Scarry finds that what we find beautiful (or not) today, may change; and she problematizes these changes as “errors.” Scarry recognizes two types of error with regard to beauty:

The first is over-crediting, when something we once deemed beautiful suddenly seems the opposite.

The second is failed generosity, when something we overlooked or dismissed we now see as beautiful.

For Scarry, an example of the second kind of error is palm trees, which she did not find beautiful, until she did. This prompts Scarry to wonder about all the beauty she has missed.

IV. Beauty is the basic impulse underlying education

One of the most compelling ideas of Scarry that Polly touched on (from my perspective) is the assertion that beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. Scarry’s argument is built on one by Simone Weil who (in Waiting for God) explains the “love of beauty” as “the love of all the truly precious things that bad fortune can destroy.”[2] Scarry notes that the first of these “truly precious things” numbered by Weil is education—what Weil calls “the pure and authentic achievements of art and sciences.” Scarry elaborates on Weil, writing:

This willingness continually to revise one’s own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky.

This hopeful passage is resonant with Rebecca Solnit’s notion of getting lost (placing oneself on the path of the unforseen) in order to be taken beyond what is already known. (See last week’s post for more on Solnit and the merits of getting lost).

What beauty is doing to us, thus far:

After introducing this last idea of Scarry, Polly asked the students how they think they have changed or what they have learned from the course, thus far. Here were some of the responses. In the parentheses are my attempts to categorize these benefits in terms of qualities of leadership.

I do things I wouldn’t do. [daring, courage, unconstrained by pragmatism]

I see other people’s points of view. I think, “There might be more going on here so I won’t jump to a conclusion.” [empathy, balancing conflicting elements, able to see things from multiple viewpoints simultaneously]

I am re-evaluating relationships in my life. [emotional intelligence]

I am asking whether I’ve had the emphasis on the wrong things. [contemplating values and purpose in relationship to action]

I am thinking about homework differently—how to make it creative, not anxiety-provoking. How not to approach homework with dread. [approaching work with creativity, imagination, hope]

I’m trying to focus on the process, not the product. [quality and excellence in the way of working, not just the end result]

I am slowing down. [paying attention, being present]

When Polly was here and giving her two lectures it was midway through the term. I had been feeling a bit anxious about making the turn from talking about beauty in art and nature to exploring how cultivating an aesthetic sensibility (encountering beauty) leads to better leadership (the promise of all those academic papers I found when I was developing my course). I provided an overview of all those papers in the essay I posted several weeks ago—Why Beauty in a Business School. You would be forgiven if you peered into that bag of bones and quickly slammed the door shut.

After Polly’s lecture–and getting this bit of feedback on the class from the students–I began to feel less anxious about this process. I perceived that, without forcing things to a particular end, but simply by committing to the experience of the class itself, the students were beginning to transform. An email from my generous and insightful pen pal/mentor, the artist Carter Gillies helped me to recognize this. He wrote to me after reading last week’s post (the one inspired by Polly’s lecture on Rebecca Solnit’s book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost).

The conclusion you draw at the end of the post is perhaps the single most important objective you could achieve: It’s not simply about perception, as if what students were learning were akin to picking up microscopes and telescopes to peer at the world differently. And they are not simply flexing some long unused muscle, changing their abilities by degree, lifting heavier mental objects, more nuanced aesthetic experience. Rather, the project they are most working on is their own transformation. They are working on the project of themselves in the same way that every artist isn’t simply learning techniques and processes but a way of fitting in the world that had been impossible for the person they once were.

If the key is being more open minded, then its not simply a difference in allowing more things as possible, an incremental adjustment, but changing from a lock with a specific keyhole to a wide open vista. It’s not a change in degree as much as in kind, the chrysalis giving way to the butterfly. Which, of course was part of the point I was making in that post [Maximum Beauty] I referred you to in a previous email suggesting that what we like and don’t like are not always divided by the increments of our better understanding them as much as the qualitative incommensurability between them. To be open minded enough to capture those inconsistent thoughts was what the F. Scott Fitzgerald quote had to do with: “An artist is someone who can hold two completely opposing viewpoints and still function”. It seems your students are on this path …

I couldn’t say it any better.

I find I am also beginning to feel some of these same benefits as a result of having set aside my dissertation for a bit to focus on the beauty course. I’m slowing down. I am more present. I am living more intuitively. I’ve thrown away the manic to-do lists I’ve lived by since at least college, maybe earlier. And I feel like my relationship to work is beginning to shift. I’m developing the capacity to relinquish control. I am learning how to approach this course and my dissertation with more curiosity and creativity, less force and determination to achieve particular ends or goals. More than anything, I’m beginning to figure out a way of fitting in the world (which I haven’t really felt since moving overseas five years ago).

PPS – Polly also lectured on the second half of Scarry’s monograph–On Beauty and Being Fair–which addresses the relationship between beauty and justice. I will discuss this particular aspect of beauty in a future post. One can handle only so much Scarry in a single post.

[2] Simone Weil, “Love of the order of the world” in Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd., p. 180

]]>http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/2015/04/what-beauty-does-taking-stock-in-week-6-of-the-class/feed/2“Disbanding our armies” (in Beauty Class)http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/2015/04/disbanding-our-armies-in-beauty-class/
http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/2015/04/disbanding-our-armies-in-beauty-class/#respondSun, 12 Apr 2015 16:21:28 +0000http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/?p=514Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go. Three years ago I was giving a workshop in the Rockies. A student came in bearing a quote from what she said was the pre-Socratic philosopher Meno. It read, “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” I copied it down, and it has stayed with me since. … The question she carried struck me as the basic tactical question in life. The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration — how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else? – Rebecca Solnit

If you have never read Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, read it. It’s a beautiful series of essays on the value of losing oneself in order to undergo transformation. The passage I’ve just quoted does a good job of conveying its essence and impetus. In week five of the beauty class we were joined by two special guests, Polly Carl, (who has been instrumental in my thinking about this course) and her partner, the fiction writer Lynette D’Amico, who designed a class session inspired by Solnit’s book.

Polly Carl: On Getting Lost

Polly spent about 90 minutes introducing students to key ideas in Solnit’s book and guiding them through a discussion on getting lost, anxiety, wandering, wondering, desire, and longing and how these relate to the creative process. She structured the lecture around a range of provocative questions she posed to the students, such as:

What would you like to become right now? We talk about who we are, but who would you like to become?

How do we “calculate the unforeseen”? When and how do we encounter that which we do not already know? When and how do we put ourselves on paths that will make this more likely?

Where do you feel longing? Where do you feel desire? Longing is the distance between where you are and where you long to be. The sensation of desire is beauty. How do we stay with the sensation of desire rather than seeking to accumulate stuff to fulfill the desire?

Do you have to be in the present to have any hope of getting lost—of putting yourself on the path of the unknown? If so, how do we stay in the present?

How often are you thinking about what you’re not doing? (This was a question posed to Polly by a scientist when she participated in an NEA research symposium on creativity and the brain.) For example, how often are you checking social media when you are not in a position to respond to it (for instance, in the middle of class)?

If creativity lives in the space of being lost and in the ability to roam, is anxiety the opposite of creativity? Solnit talks about how explorers got lost all the time; however, the difference between explorers and the rest of us is that they approach getting lost with optimism. Has anxiety replaced optimism? How much anxiety do you feel about school, for instance? What would it mean to replace this with optimism and creativity?

How do others see you? When do you see yourself? How do we become lost to ourselves? Solnit tells us lost has two meanings: the familiar falling away and the unfamiliar appearing. Do we need to lose the sense of how we are perceived through the eyes of others in order to see ourselves more clearly?

In perhaps my favorite moment in the lecture, Polly talked about the following passage from Solnit’s book:

The word ‘lost’ comes from the Old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army, and this origin suggests soldiers falling out of formation to go home, a truce with the wide world. I worry now that many people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know. Advertising, alarmist news, technology, incessant busyness, and the design of public and private space conspire to make it so.

Polly ended her lecture by telling the students about an experience (that she had with Lynette) of getting trapped underground in a NYC subway packed with people, without air conditioning or lights, on a blazing hot day. After a short break, Lynette then read the short story she eventually wrote, Fictions of the City, inspired by the subway fiasco. The point of this exercise was to examine how an artist takes an experience (in this case, one filled with tremendous anxiety) and shapes it into a story.

Lynette commented after reading her story to the students: Stories are how we make sense of the world and experience things that don’t make sense to us. They are how we stand in the prsence of wonder and mystery. She then talked about the process she used to approach the project (among many things, her research on various aspects of subways in NYC and her desire to make a connection to The Great Gatsby).

Lynette then showed the William Kentridge video, Journey to the Moon, which she used as a catalyst to talk about what it means to live in a space of wonder and mystery. She also read a statement by Kentridge to the students: There is a desperation in all certainty. The category of political uncertainty, philosophical uncertainty, uncertainty of images is much closer to how the world is.

The students were asked to think about the possible meanings of various elements in the film in light of this statement.

Portfolio Assignment #1: Wander to Wonder

At the end of class, Lynette gave the students the following portfolio assignment:

Get lost and record the experience. The form of getting lost can be geographical or experiential. It could be going somewhere you’ve never been before, which can be a neighborhood, a park, a lake, a city, a building. It could be going to a restaurant and ordering a type of food you haven’t had before. It could be going to a church. It could be going to a sports event. It could be going to an arts event. It could be doing something you’ve never done before, something you’ve been thinking about, or wanting to do, like trying a pilates class at your gym, or riding a city bus, or something spur of the moment and spontaneous, finding a roof top where you can watch the sun rise, or watching a foreign film. The parameters are that you have to go someplace where you don’t already know the rules or the norms, and document your experience, and the documentation can be in a form of your choosing. You can write about the experience, take photos, send a series of texts to a buddy and then capture those texts.

Some studets went to restaurants, some wandered down streets in parts of town where they had never ventured, one walked into a small gallery on campus she had always been curious about, and more than a few ended up losing their smart phones for a day. Here’s how student Lindsay Bloomfield documented her experience of losing her connection to her phone for a day.

No signal.

I lost my friend Siri yesterday. I lost my friends Chris Martin, Taylor Rice, and Kanye West whom I talk to almost everyday. I ached to hear my friend cry out “Turn left in 300 feet”. But, it was quiet.

Silent.

Then I heard it. The faintest rustle of the trees. The deep bellowing of my breath. The laughs coming from an unknown place up the street.

Then I saw it. The blinding sun piercing across the vast sky. That night I saw the same sky splattered with perfectly sporadic specks.

Then I felt it. Above the ache for my simulated friends on my 5.44 x 2.64 screen, I was a present in the present. A gift of the hour. The hour, in turn, a gift to me. It was a symmetry I hadn’t found before.

A peacefulness.

Portfolio Assignment #2: How to Listen to Music

In the last half hour of class I talked with the students about another portfolio assignment I had given them the week prior. I asked the students to watch a TED Talk by the renowned conductor, Michael Tilson Thomas, called Music and Emotion Through Time. I then asked them to sit quietly, do nothing, listen to a piece of music lasting at least 40 minutes, and document the experience.

A number of students commented after their classical music listening experience that they had never actually sat quietly and listened to a long piece of classical music from start to finish. Many also remarked on how soothing, clarifying, inspiring or energizing it was. Given our discussions about anxiety and the pressure that students feel in relationship to school and life, this struck me as rather meaningful.

Nothing anxious here. If anything, the image is quite the opposite–both soulful and transcendent.

***

As I reflected on Solnit’s gorgeous book and this equally gorgeous class session designed by Polly Carl and Lynette D’Amico, I thought:

This is the value of beauty in a business school. It requires that students “disband their armies” … “go beyond what they know” … “expand their boundaries.” By sending them out into the world each week with assignments to get lost, sit quietly, really listen, look closely and then reflect on what they sense, feel, and think–they are not just learning a new (aesthetic) way of knowing the world, they are also encountering different parts of themselves. They are learning a different way of being in the world.

]]>http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/2015/04/disbanding-our-armies-in-beauty-class/feed/0Awakening to truths about ourselves and the world (in the Beauty Class)http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/2015/03/awakening-to-truths-about-ourselves-and-the-world-in-the-beauty-class/
http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/2015/03/awakening-to-truths-about-ourselves-and-the-world-in-the-beauty-class/#commentsThu, 26 Mar 2015 12:42:32 +0000http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/?p=508

This is the sixth post in a series of posts focused on the course on beauty that I am coordinating/teaching for business students at UW-Madison. In the fourth week of the Beauty Class I wanted to explore the notion, articulated by Jeanette Winterson, that “art can waken us to truths about ourselves and the world.” The class examined works by two artists: monologist/raconteur Mike Daisey, whose piece The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs was aimed at getting people to think about about the injurious labor conditions by which their beautiful Apple devices are made; and transdisciplinary social artist Laura Anderson Barbata (born in Mexico and currently based in New York City), whose ongoing Julia Pastrana Project has been aimed at getting people to see the “ugliest woman in the world” as a human being with rights rather than as an object of scientific study or historical artifact.

On the Nature of Artistic Truth: Mike Daisey & His This American Life Fiasco

As probably anyone reading this blog knows, in 2010 Mike Daisey, a renowned storyteller, created a show that centered on his experience of going to China and witnessing firsthand the egregious working conditions in the FoxConn factory in Shenzhen where Apple products are made. When it premiered, and as it gained attention, the piece was hailed by many theater critics and business journalists as an exceedingly well-researched and well-crafted piece that succeeded in humanizing the issues, arousing empathy, and sustaining public discussion around unfair labor practices by overseas manufacturers of Apple products and other electronic devices.

Portfolio Assignment

The first part of the weekly portfolio assignment was for students to listen to Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory, an episode of This American Life in which Daisey performs a version of his show. After listening to the episode they were asked to write down their thoughts and feelings about Apple, its products, Mike Daisey, and theater/storytelling.

Unsurprisingly, almost all the students in my class own one or more apple products; somewhat surprisingly, more than a few have actually worked for Apple. While a couple of students were skeptical of Daisey’s piece, and wondered how true it was as they were listening to it, most were completely absorbed by the story and deeply troubled by it. Here are a handful of pretty typical responses:

#1 – After listening to this podcast, I am questioning how many of my technology products are made and the path each item takes before it gets into my hands.

#2 – It makes me feel ashamed that companies would allow sweatshops and abusive labor situations to occur. The stories about the suicides and injuries make me feel sick …

#3 – This has definitely changed my perception of Apple. They are such a well-known company and treat their employees very well, but as soon as the jobs go overseas to increase their margins, then everything goes down the gutter. Apple, being a front-runner in future technology should also be a front-runner in global-labor rights. This was definitely a good podcast to listen to.

#4 Throughout this story I thought about this winter break and how I was annoyed when I ordered my new iPhone that the ship date was TBD … Reflecting on this experience, it didn’t even cross my mind that there are workers making these phones. Daisey talked about how when there’s a new Apple product it’s not uncommon for workers to work 18 hour days. It made me feel guilty for being annoyed that there was a wait for my new iPhone. I realized it’s people like me … that cause [Apple’s] manufacturers in China to feel pressure to work their employees overtime to meet demands like mine.

I then asked the students to listen to a second This American Life episode featuring Daisey—the Retraction episode, in which Daisey is interrogated about certain facts of his story that do not seem to hold up under rigorous fact-checking. Over the course of the episode Daisey and his story come undone as he acknowledges, in what seems to be a state of distress, that he fabricated some of the events portrayed as truths (i.e., facts) in his story.

Once again, I asked the students to write down their thoughts and feelings after listening to the podcast. I also asked them to reflect on the nature of artistic truth and whether and how it differs from other types of truth (for instance, in journalism).

Unsurprisingly, almost all the students initially were “outraged” to realize that some of the most moving and troubling parts of Daisey’s story were not true—meaning he had not actually experienced some of the events that he claimed to have experienced. Many used the word “betrayed” to describe how they felt; some indicated that they felt foolish or duped or silly for having become emotionally involved in the first episode.

A handful of students were ready to write-off Daisey’s story in its entirety because of its fabricated parts—for them, the piece had lost all integrity. However, a majority of students were able to see both sides. In their written refelections many were able to see the larger truth Daisey was trying to convey and acknowledge the artistic and social value of his theater piece, even while feeling that the choice to present the work as fact within a journalistic frame was short-sighted, inappropriate, unethical, or deceitful.

Here is one student’s written response to the Retraction episode. It is an example of how many students reconciled these two sides.

… I believe it was wrong for him to lie on This American Life. It was not wrong to create this story and theater piece of work; but speaking on this show and implying that his story was journalism was completely wrong. Artistic truth and journalistic truth are completely different … Daisey’s piece is artistic. His story is moving and makes people think about the working conditions overseas, but it is not all factual.

Although my views have changed and I am disappointed that Daisey thought it was perfectly fine to lie on national [public] radio, the fact that these working conditions could still exist is unacceptable. Charles Duhigg states at the very end of the podcast that we, as in the people who are users of Apple products (such as myself), are not only the direct beneficiaries of these conditions, but the reason they exist. …Our nation is not demanding different conditions …

A couple of students tweeted their thoughts after listening to the second episode and in both cases Daisey responded to them—in one instance sending a link to a blog post on the topic. We spent some time discussing sections from that post and considering Daisey’s “rules” and how, in principle, he reconciles telling a good story with getting the facts right.

Laura Anderson Barbata: Visiting Guest Artist

Photo of the preserved corpse of Julia Pastrana

For the second half of class the students watched a presentation by UW-Madison Artist in Residence, Laura Anderson Barbata, who creates transdisciplinary public art performances that speak to social issues. Before giving her own presentation, Barbata was able to join us for the discussion of Daisey’s work. She has seen all of Daisey’s monologues and sees tremendous craft and value in his work (as do I). After soliciting comments from the students, I asked Barbata if her high regard for Daisey and his work as an artist was diminished in light of the scandal surrounding This American Life. She responded, “Not at all.”

Barbata’s lecture centered on her Julia Pastrana Project, which came about as a result of participating in a 2003 theater piece created by her sister in which audience members sat in total darkness for hours listening to the story of Julia Pastrana (1834-1860)—the “ugliest woman in the world.” Julia was a highly intelligent woman who suffered from a condition that caused excessive hair growth on her face and body. She spent most of her adult life as a carnival attraction being advertised as a hybrid bear-woman. After her death, during childbirth, the bodies of Julia and her baby were preserved, studied by scientists, and toured as freak-show curiosities. In response to public outrage they were taken off the touring circuit in the 1970s (!) and stored in a closet at a university in Norway, where they began to decay due to exposure to water, sunlight, and rodents. When this decay was discovered the remains were sealed in a coffin and stored in the Department of Anatomy at the Oslo Forensic Institute.

And this is where the story ended when Barbata’s sister made her theater piece and submitted a petition, signed by hundreds, requesting that the remains be repatriated and properly buried. There was no response to the request; and this compelled Laura Anderson Barbata to use an artist fellowship grant to travel to Norway in 2004 to better understand Julia Pastrana and what had happened to the petition.

This initial inquiry became a multi-year project, the aim of which was to get people to see Julia not as an artifact but as a human, a woman with a medical condition, a mother, and a Catholic, with rights—rights to be repatriated to her native home in Mexico, have her death authenticated and acknowledged, receive last rights, and be granted a proper burial. The project was a success. Pastrana was returned to her small village in Mexico and buried in 2013. You can read an excellent chronology of Pastrana’s life and Barbata’s project, here. One of the artworks associated with the project is the print Julia y Laura (below) which features the only known photo of Julia Pastrana when she was alive and the artist, Laura Anderson Barbata.

***

Julia y Laura, 2013. Laura Anderson Barbata. Posted with permission.

In reflecting on these works by Mike Daisey and Laura Anderson Barbata I am reminded of Elaine Scarry’s argument that, etymologically, the word that best represents the opposite of beauty is injury, not ugliness. I wanted them to think about how and why these artists were able to awaken consciousness to injuries being perpetuated when the facts of these stories (which were known for years before these artists made their work) had failed to do so. I wanted them to see how these artists help us see parts in relationship to the whole (person or system)–and in particular, our part in perpetuating injuries.

However, I also wanted them to experience how easy it is to forget the initial empathy we feel for the workers at FoxConn and order the new Iphone anyway; how easy it is to sign a petition and then promptly forget about Julia Pastrana stuck in a coffin in a lab in Oslo.This suggests that we need a process for remembering, for keeping our eyes open, for being awakened to truths about ourselves and our world over and over again.

As Jeanette Winterson says, “Art can bring us back to consciousness, sometimes quietly, sometimes dramatically, but the responsibility to act on what we find is ours.”

Post Script:

While in class, Laura Anderson Barbata also took a few moments to show a video of her work Intervention Wall Street, a street performance that featured African American men (the Brooklyn Jumbies) walking on stilts in suits through Wall Street during the Occupy Movement, handing out gold chocolate coins to actual Wall Street suits, while the O’Jays song For the Love of Money played in the background. Her aim was to engage and respond to the social and economic issues raised by the economic collapse of Wall Street. You can watch the trailer below to get a sense of the piece (Laura Anderson Barbata is the woman featured in the piece.) Coincidentally, the original video artwork Intervention Wall Street is owned by the school of management at my university in the Netherlands, where it is a catalyst for discussions.